Allan Massie is a Scottish writer who has published nearly 30 books, including a sequence of novels set in ancient Rome. His non-fiction works range from a study of Byron's travels to a celebration of Scottish rugby. He has been a political columnist for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph and writes a literary column for The Spectator.

The second question is easily answered. Longrigg – born 1929, educated at Bryanston and Oxford where, according to one Penguin blurb (which I guess he wrote himself), “his literary activities were confined to answering invitations” – worked in advertising when it was the fashionable career for bright sparks in the Fifties, and his first three novels were all comedies set in the advertising world. The first of them was A High Pitched Buzz, and I remember it as being very funny indeed. His widow told Aidan Smith that he got a £100 advance for it.

Then, as Smith puts it, “he stopped sitting through tedious meetings about brand diversification and became a wildly diversifying writerly brand.” This was on the advice of his agent, Graham Watson, who told him that he needed to write three books a year to keep the family, but that "not even Dick Francis fans want to read three of his in twelve months.” I’m not sure about that. When Dick was in his prime, I would happily have read a new Francis every couple of months if he could have managed such a rate of production.

Be that as it may, Longrigg did as his agent bid, and diversified like mad. In the end he wrote 55 novels, and had seven pseudonyms. He wrote comedies, thrillers and bodice-rippers, these last as Laura Black, but undoubtedly his greatest success was The Passion Flower Hotel. Its nominal author was Rosalind Erskine, said to be a 15-year-old schoolgirl, and it told how girls at a highly respectable boarding school established a brothel in their gym for the boys from the neighbouring public school., As I recall, the sex scenes were far from steamy, certainly by the standards of later decades, but, coming out in 1962, the year before sex began (too late for Philip Larkin), it went down a treat. There was much speculation about the author, some mischievously putting one or other of Evelyn Waugh’s daughters in the frame. Eventually, fuelled by too many Martinis at a publishing party, – those were the days, as Paul Johnson has often recalled, when publishers served hard liquor rather than acidulous white wine – Longrigg spilled the beans to someone who, despite being sworn to secrecy, passed it on to a gossip columnist. The result: “Bald adman is Rosalind Erskine.” Sales plummeted.

Aidan Smith’s article may revive interest in Longrigg, whose comedies of the advertising world , with their smartly snappy dialogue, retain their vitality. Curiously , however, he doesn’t mention Longrigg’s best novel, Daughters of Mulberry. Published under his own name , this is a bittersweet comedy/mystery about the Racing world. It has a neat plot and one of the most sympathetic heroes in modern fiction, Major Desmond Cook. For years now Cook has been frequenting the racecourses every day. Tired and ageing, he is struggling to win enough to retire and buy a house and little farm where he will grow fruit. He has been preparing for this by taking a correspondence course, very slowly. Sometimes he gets near the target of £30,000 he has set himself, then plunges wildly and must start all over again .Every night he dines in his club. “Look at old Desmond,” one member says. “Lost to the world. Lovely life he has – racing every day, honking every night.” "Yes and no," said his companion, who knew Cook better. It’s a lovely novel, rich in comedy and touched with pathos. I’ve read it half-a-dozen times at least since Penguin published the paperback edition in 1963, and always with purring pleasure.

To end on a sad note, worthy of Major Desmond Cook himself: his widow recalls that Longrigg used to smoke 60 Benson & Hedges a day. “Ciggies,” she says, “sharpened his brain. He stopped 15 years before he died and I’m afraid he never wrote a good book again.”